Rich: It’s very slick, highly slick really, but the content is only kind of neat. It does work just about seamlessly on the 360 and certainly gives us much more content for free, but arrested development is the only show up there. Joost at least has all of cbs’s shows (ncis, csi, etc…) Microsoft needs to quickly expand their umbrella and work out some content deals for it to be worthwhile. but, it’s typical MS proof of concept beta stuff, it works well, but there’s just not much to see.

Tim: I’m still a little confused on how the content works. It’s actually all quite confusing to me if I turn myself into a normal “TV user”. It’s broken up into several different slices, which I guess is OK, but I’d much prefer it to be managed a bit better. I’d like to just see the 6-7 channels that they have, and maybe 3 or 4 “user-created channels” that builds content based on tags for us geeks out here. Unfortunately, they’ve just pre-sliced those potentially user-created channels for you into main subheadings like “sports” and “entertainment” (kinda useless and a bit strange in the “TV” concept of execution), and then the main “channels” like National Geographic and A&E don’t work that way at all, since you can see a list of the programs, but once you click on it, it just branches off in a stony haze to whatever it thinks you should be watching. The ad system works fairly decently (surprise, surprise they got THAT right), but the rest of it feels just a touch messier than I expected. I guess we’ll see if they sharpen it over time.